Materiality of Memorialization: Mapping Migrant Women's Landmarks in Europe

RESEARCH ARTICLE  Materiality of Memorialization: Mapping Migrant Women's Landmarks in Europe [version 3; peer review: 2 approved, 2 approved with reservations] Bénédicte Miyamoto 1, Maija Ojala-Fulwood2, Veronika Čapská 3, Fiona Eva Bakas 4, Igor Lyman5, María Amor Barros-del Río 6, Maria Bostenaru Dan 7, Alba Comino 8, Pirita Frigren9, Victoria Konstantinova5, Heidi Martins10, Lívia Prosinger11, Pauliina Räsänen 12, Biljana Ristovska-Josifovska 13, Marie Ruiz 14 1Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, France 2Tampere University, Tampere, Finland 3Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic 4Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon, Portugal 5Berdyansk State Pedagogical University, Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine 6University of Burgos, Burgos, Spain 7Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urban Planning, Bucharest, Romania 8Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal 9University of Turku, Pori, Finland 10Centre de Documentation sur les Migrations Humaines, Dudelange, Luxembourg 11Institute of Political History, Budapest, Hungary 12University of Turku, Turku, Finland 13Institute of National History, Skopje, North Macedonia 14Université de Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France First published: 25 Oct 2024, 4:234 https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.18433.1 Second version: 07 Mar 2025, 4:234 https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.18433.2 Latest published: 11 Nov 2025, 4:234 https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.18433.3 v3 Abstract This article investigates the memorialization of migrant women across transcultural landscapes, and analyses results from the Register of Migrant Women Landmarks in Europe (hereinafter RMWLE), central to the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) action project “Women on the Move” (CA19112 – WEMov). It serves as reference for subsequent research based on data from this Register, for which data collection is continuing. The RMWLE registers landmarks, such as monuments, plaques, streets and other toponymic infrastructures named after women with a significant history of migration. It honours aspects rarely prioritized in memorialization agendas, which are skewed towards men’s stories, and towards the Open Peer Review Approval Status 1234 version 3 (revision) 11 Nov 2025 version 2 (revision) 07 Mar 2025 view view version 1 25 Oct 2024 view view view view Eva Johanna Holmberg , University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 1. Open Research Europe  Page 1 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 more linear biographies of sedentary figures whose European, national, and regional memorialization have remained uncomplicated by migration. This Deep Data study reveals recurring patterns at the level of Europe in the memorialization of these women migrants. The diversity of stories, the richness and the prominence of landmarks devoted to men compared to women is a subject well-covered in memorialization studies. This unbalance is compounded by the data from our register which shows landmarks on women migrants that are sometime tokenized, often marginalized, and which reproduce the bias towards nurture and care that have besieged the memorialization of women in general. It further shows that the memorialization process and the political and cultural mechanisms of official commemoration often work against the recognition of cross-border careers and stories. The intersectionality of the project, highlighting both gender and migration, uncovers a political landscape of landmarks – and we reflect on how this register can help combat cultural prejudice by recovering migration episodes. The RMWLE helps us reflect on the defining impact of migration episodes, a reality rarely underlined in the biographies of famous women. This article is based on a quantitative content analysis, focused on identifying measurable features and frequencies within the RMLWE dataset, and combines it with a storytelling approach at the interpretation stage, to counter dominant cultural narratives and knowledge practices. Plain language summary This article is interested in how famous women who have migrated are remembered across European countries in ways that makes their name public and visible, be it through street names, plaques, statues or monuments for example. This article explains the methods, results and difficulties that went into creating the Register of Migrant Women Landmarks in Europe (hereinafter RMWLE), central to the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) action project “Women on the Move” (CA19112 – WEMov). Women have long achieved public fame and have built important careers even while migrating, and often thanks to their migration. This article investigates how and where these figures are honoured and given pride of place in European nations, and reflects on their marginal or tokenized presence in European cities. We compare these women migrant landmarks to monuments built for their male counterparts, we trace how migrant women are often bypassed in favour of national figures that have not migrated, and we advocate for a more diverse representation of meaningful female figures to celebrate in European cities. Keywords gender inequality, migration, toponomy, cultural memory, memory politics, critical place-naming, Minki Sung , Newcastle University School of Architecture Planning and Landscape (Ringgold ID: 151479), Newcastle upon Tyne, UK 2. Mihai S. Rusu , Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania 3. Andrea Kocsis , University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 4. Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. Open Research Europe  Page 2 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 Corresponding author: Bénédicte Miyamoto ([email protected]) Author roles: Miyamoto B: Investigation, Methodology, Supervision; Ojala-Fulwood M: Investigation, Supervision; Čapská V: Investigation, Supervision; Bakas FE: Investigation, Supervision; Lyman I: Investigation, Supervision; Barros-del Río MA: Investigation; Bostenaru Dan M: Investigation; Comino A: Investigation; Frigren P: Investigation; Konstantinova V: Investigation; Martins H: Investigation; Prosinger L: Data Curation, Validation; Räsänen P: Investigation; Ristovska-Josifovska B: Investigation; Ruiz M: Investigation, Project Administration Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Grant information: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Framework Programme for Research & Innovation as part of the COST Action [CA19112 Women on the Move], as supported by the COST Association (European Cooperation in Science and Technology). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Copyright: © 2025 Miyamoto B et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. How to cite this article: Miyamoto B, Ojala-Fulwood M, Čapská V et al. Materiality of Memorialization: Mapping Migrant Women's Landmarks in Europe [version 3; peer review: 2 approved, 2 approved with reservations] Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.18433.3 First published: 25 Oct 2024, 4:234 https://doi.org/10.12688/openreseurope.18433.1 This article is included in the COST Actions gateway. This article is included in the Women on the Move collection. Open Research Europe  Page 3 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 Introduction The Register of Migrant Women Landmarks in Europe (hereinafter RMWLE), central to the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) action project “Women on the Move” (CA19112 – WEMov) 2020–2024, went beyond the consideration of statues in the urban landscape. Registered along with a variety of monuments were not only odonyms, (street names) but a vast array of urban toponyms (from parks to bridges, including such varied urban infrastructure as nurseries and hospitals). The project is ongoing, but a dataset collected from September 2020 to July 2023 is accessible (Bakas et al., 2023)1. It is accompanied by a Data Note (Ojala-Fulwood et al., 2024)2. This register of monuments and toponyms bearing the names of women with a significant history of migration honours aspects rarely prioritized in memorialization agendas. We underline how migrant women’s achievements are overshadowed in European, national, and regional cultural commemoration compared to men’s achievements and compared to figures whose biographies have a more linear narrative, uncomplicated by migration. The diversity of stories, the abundance and the prominence of landmarks devoted to men compared to women is a subject well-covered in memorialization studies. The European architectural landscape under study is particularly androcentric (Novas Ferradás, 2018) and the European Data Journalism Network finds that just 6 out of the 100 most popular figures in the street names of 15 European capitals are women (https://mappingdiversity.eu/). This unbalance is compounded by the data from our register which shows landmarks on women migrants that are sometime tokenized, often marginalized, and which reproduce a gendered bias towards nurture and care that have besieged the memorialization of women in general. It further shows that cultural memory relies on a definition of collective identity that is often subsumed in national identities, with monuments and toponyms forging a trivialized, habitual patriotism (Rutkowski, 2023). Therefore, the memorialization process and the political and cultural mechanisms of official memorialization have often worked against the recognition of cross-border careers and stories. Less supported by institutions who tend to curate local, regional or national figures, and often put aside in the focused research of experts and historians who still tend to be specialist of an area as well as a period, these cross-border commemorations remain rare. The dataset delves into the legacy of migrant women, a legacy that is shared in two or more countries and are often politically and culturally contested. The resulting article benefits from the rise of transcultural studies intending to interrogate memory between and beyond borders and participates in the critical turn in place-naming studies (Bond & Rapson, 2014; Rose-Redwood et al., 2010). Recovering the toponomy of women migrant in the European landscape has uncovered many questions. Firstly, what’s in a name? The “politics of place” has been an active - and activist – research topic in the last decades (Cresswell, 2004). It has renewed our appreciation of how much public landmarks, which are often taken for granted or fading away in the fabric of our everyday commute through the city, are in fact negotiated and contested (Berg & Vuolteenaho, 2016). The cultural debate has emphasized that memorialization of public figures has an impact that is more than just cosmetic or symbolic, and that it influences the cultural debate, shaping the identity of heritage at a local and national level, in ways that have tended to reproduce a dominant narrative of systemic injustice (Clerval et al., 2015). Secondly, the register interrogates why and which landmarks matter. This article explores the visibility of women through toponomy, and their minoritization. We discuss the cultural politics and the politics of memory behind the stories commemorated in the urban landscape, keeping in mind that “how people construct the past through a process of appropriation and contestation” also interrogates the very act of memorialization that this register is built on (Confino, 1997, 1403). By making space in this article for these migrant women’s life stories, we are inspired by the recent push to shape history through renewed narratives (Andrews, 2007; Maurantonio, 2014) and through a narrative framework of resistance (Smith, 2017). Ultimately, we hope to foster reflexivity from the audience when confronted with interacting and interlocking stories of female working and migrating life experiences (Gherardi & Poggio, 2009). Thirdly, the register discloses a class bias in memorialization with an overwhelming commemoration of women from the upper-classes, together with a persistent gender-coding, especially in relation to professions and the perception of traditional feminine roles in the fields of care and education. Looking at the gender balance of street names and statues helps put the national or city narratives to right and eschew former patriarchal or exclusive narratives. Naming a street or commissioning 1 The dataset is accessible on NAKALA at https://doi.org/10.34847/nkl.28cf9j6q (Bakas et al., 2023). 2 The Data Note is accessible on Open Research Europe at https://open-researcheurope.ec.europa.eu/articles/4-109 ((Ojala-Fulwood et al., 2024). Amendments from Version 2 This new version corrects the abstract section to make the methodological choices clearer, stating we are combining quantitative methods with a storytelling approach at the interpretation stage. In the method and data collection section, we differenciate between surveys that include or exclude allegorical landmarks. In the Results section, we also give a brief sketch of which jurisdiction or level of governance the decisions to name landmarks generally depend on; we also nuance our finding that memorializing migrant women in Europe remains skewed towards the elite - by stressing that if ESCO categories quantitatively show a higher level of landmarks memorializing elite women, a sizeable number of them were activists, fighting to give power to minoritized or the downtrodden, redrawing the hierarchy of the elite’s “power over” the other ESCO categories. Any further responses from the reviewers can be found at the end of the article REVISED Page 4 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 a statue is a political act, inscribing an authorized version of history into ordinary settings of everyday life (Azaryahu, 1996; Calotă, 2010). That authorized version is evidently not consensual. The public space is the space of memory politics, the space of decision making and negotiation. As the art historian Milena Bartlová argues, “visual, or rather material images can be – and very often are – a visible and tangible embodiment of power relations and that the erection or removal of a public sculpture is as political an act as there can be” (Bartlová, 2021, 134). In this sense, the RMWLE stands as a political act in its gathering of women migrant landmarks and its highlighting of their heritage. The selected landmarks and migrant trajectories in the RMWLE feature cross-community or cross-cultural migration. They show both typical and exceptional forms of mobility and present women of different age, profession, social status and migration status. This intersectionality of the project and the dataset highlights not only the richness of these landmarks and their value for scholarship but also the wide spectrum of migrant women and their contribution to society. Method and data collection The methodology used corresponds to “Quantitative Content Analysis” and focuses on identifying patterns, themes, and categories within the Register of Migrant Women Landmarks in Europe dataset1. This approach enables an analysis of how migrant women are represented and memorialized in various European urban settings, and is “an unobtrusive technique that allows researchers to analyse relatively unstructured data in view of the meanings, symbolic qualities, expressive contents they have and of the communicative roles they play in the lives of the data’s sources” (Krippendorff, 2019, 51). This method is appropriate for the study of how memorialization is materialized in the urban landscape, since quantitative content analysis when examining visual materials “helps us to examine important questions of ideological influence and the ways in which particular versions of reality are constructed and fashioned over time and across a variety of media (…) in order to both devise meaningful categories in the research design and to enable interpretation of why such resulting frequencies or omissions are culturally or politically significant” (Parry, 2020). The data collection, which took place in different European regions and languages, relied on the linguistic expertise of the COST WEMov network members, and their in-person knowledge of local topographies. Meanwhile, through this register of memorialized migrant women in different European contexts, we hope to enable Case Studies from researchers using our dataset, through in-depth examination of specific scenarios, such as the treatment of migrant women in a particular European country or professional sector, to highlight locally specific or historically specific cases of memorialization of migrant women which resist the homogeneity of a Europe-wide dataset, for example in settings of decommunization and ideological struggles with nationalism, or in cities marked by nineteenth-century bourgeois high art values enshrined by logics of preservation. These would “explain the presumed causal link in real-life interventions that are too complex for the survey strategy” (Yin, 2003, 15). In Humanities and Social Sciences research, thorough documentation is essential to ensure both the reproducibility of the research and the usability of the resulting resources (Middle, 2023). The collection of data is an ongoing process which started in September 2020 and the dataset to which this article refers presents the data collection as of July 2023. The available empirical material of migrant women landmarks “in situ” is subject to change as the memorial landscape evolves, and our research has been deliberately conceived as open-ended and open access. The WEMov project dataset adheres to the FAIR principles, making it easy to find and accessible via this NAKALA repository. The data are interoperable and reusable in other research thanks to its CC-BY-4.0 license. Additionally, we have made efforts to align the dataset with the Checklist to Publish Collections as Data in GLAM institutions (Candela et al., 2023). Consequently, the proposed methodology, in combination with the dataset, ensures the reproducibility of the results. The dataset falls under the concept of Deep Data as opposed to Big Data, as we work with structured data digitally curated through a complex review system. The term Deep Data refers to a dataset that is not very big, but semantically rich, and provides contextually wealthy information intended to provide a rewarding user experience (Štular & Belak, 2022). The main aim of the RMWLE is to provide the variables for each occurrence of migrant women’s landmarks in Europe, in columns comprising landmark categories, geo-coordinates, address, country, short description, the identified woman’s occupation as well as its ESCO classification, and her standardized name and biographical dates. The processing and creating of this type of data is timeconsuming because the annotation is heavily dependent on human analysis. The collection of data was based on voluntary work of 52 scholars and students, listed as having contributed to the collection of data for the RMWLE in the Data Note (Ojala-Fulwood et al., 2024). These researchers coming from 41 different countries built a dataset covering 41 countries (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United-Kingdom). We eschewed historical boundaries in our collection, which currently spans from the 9th century to the present, to build a picture of what, as of now, is present in the European architectural memorial landscape (rather than a picture of landmarks erected or named since a specific date; or landmarks referring to women active during a specific period). The main goal of the article was to be able to give current quantitative data to highlight the dearth of figures in the memorial landscape that intersect both migration history and the identity of women. We did not allow for landmarks that have disappeared or been replaced, and if such landmarks from older databases or historical documents appeared at the collection stage, the need for currently valid geo-coordinates to be Page 5 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 registered in our dataset enabled us to weed out erased or displaced landmarks. As we continued the collection and refined the design of the dataset, we were faced with the following challenges: who is counted as a migrant woman and thus should be included in the RMWLE? What trajectories count as migratory? How far, how long, and how frequent did mobility have to be to count as transnational cross-borders migration? We acknowledged different degrees of intensity and frequency in the migration and re-migration episodes of these women, choosing to look for significant societal roles and functions involving both their home and host societies, according to current definitions of a transnational social field (Boccagni, 2012; Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2004). Indeed, a strict national border criterion cannot be used consistently, and current definitions of the transnational draw on the concept of cross-community migration (Manning, 2006). Given the long historical period covered and the upheavals to which borders have been subjected, our project accounts for various forms of geographical mobilities which represent, in our actor-centred understanding of migrant biographies, significant changes of cultural and political spaces. All landmarks in the RMWLE therefore refer to a significant episode of migration in one or more women’s history, understood as cross-community or cross-cultural migration exceeding one year. They show both typical and exceptional forms of mobility and present women of different age, profession, and social and migratory status. The gender of the women memorialized in statues, monuments, or plaques across Europe, and commemorated with schools, museums or hospitals named after them is often central to the acts of memorialization. That their biographies frequently uncover varied and diverse stories of migrations is less well known, rarely commented upon when such monuments are erected and remains very much in the background of feminist activism to increase the number, quality and inventiveness of female landmarks across Europe. Reclaiming the migratory episodes of these women’s careers and trajectories is central to the RMWLE’s goals, as it underlines that “the analytical precision necessitates the term migrant to be used more systematically, precisely because we must put to rest the idea that definitions are only operative if they gauge how voluntary or self-willed the act of migration is, has been or will continue to be” (Miyamoto & Ruiz, 2021, 11). We hope that this RMWLE and its labour of biographical and mnemonic care will redress this unbalance and fuel research on the intersection of gender and migration. Another challenge regarding what landmarks should be harvested was the question of what or who the landmark represented. We choose to harvest data on migrant woman memorialized as embodied and not just allegorical. Previous studies about women represented in public art have harvested such allegorical representation as denoting female presence in the city landscape nonetheless (Ouali et al., 2021; Posso-Yépez et al., 2025). But increasingly, the difference between representations of women and representations of femininity are being stressed, and campaigns such as the artists Gillie and Marc Schattner Statues for Legends or the UK survey supported by The Public Statues and Sculpture Association (PSSA) exclude allegories in their surveys. Our selection criteria cross references womanhood and the experience of migration in the biography of the woman represented, and made the allegorical category of monument irrelevant to the register. Not only are allegorical representation devoid of biography, but they often erase women’s lived experiences and enhance stereotypical features of womanhood. This project favours a storytelling approach, to counter dominant cultural narratives and knowledge practices, and for effective storytelling, commemorative place naming had to have taken place for the landmark to be registered. In some cases, landmarks with family, married couple or a collective were included, but only if the migrant women had played a significant role and were specifically identified by name, by profession or by clear representation. Some of the landmarks we accepted are unnamed or generic, but still clearly defined as a migrant woman or women. In general, landmarks were not accepted unless they were dedicated or named after the woman migrant in a significant act of commemoration. The act needed to be mnemonic, intent on leaving the woman’s name or profession as an imprint on the social landscape. Geared towards providing a cartographic visualization of these landmarks, the data collection strove for geographical balance while harvesting the data. The effort of collecting this data is still ongoing, but some areas are better represented as the RMWLE stands due to the nature of data collection. The results are not exhaustive enough to enable us to make quantitative comparisons by national categories yet, but some patterns are already pointing to which European countries have traditionally or more recently awarded space to the commemoration of migrant women. These are consistent with similar research conducted on European monuments and toponyms (Corona & Ferrari, 2023; Ouali et al., 2021; Rusu, 2024). Cultural differences in place-naming do not always pertain to nationalistic or male-centred practices, however. Commemorative place-naming in certain Slavic European countries, for example, is less honorific and person-based than in others, favouring the memorialization of dates, events, or political values instead, especially throughout the urban expansion of the twentieth century (Jaroslav, 2011). What about the categories of landmarks that emerged from our data collection? At 1000 entries strong, it is possible to refine and discuss the categories of landmarks in this project. The project’s main goal was to harvest landmarks that heightened the visibility in the landscape of migrant women, and which recognized more diverse achievements. We therefore quickly broadened the register of monumental commemorative landmarks such as statues to include all sorts of toponyms (the proper names of places, also known as place name or geographic names), oeconym, (the proper name of a house or any other residential building), astionims (proper names of cities and towns), as well as urbanonyms (the proper names of urban elements such as streets, squares etc. in settlements) which include agoronyms (proper names of squares and marketplaces) and hodonyms (proper names of streets and roads). This enabled a fuller register of the political landscape in the RMWLE which now includes elements such as tombs, lighthouses, and waterfalls, Page 6 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 among others. Finally, the harvesting was classified in sixteen different categories of commemorative landmarks: burial (cemetery, mausoleum, tomb...); cultural venue (cinema, library, museum, theatre...) educational venue (school, university...); former residence; green space (garden, promenade, square...); housing (flat, council homes...); institute (foundation, research centre...); monument (bust, statue...); medical venue (hospital, retirement home...); natural site (bay, lake, waterfall...); plaques (murals, stepping stones); religious venues (church, mosque, synagogue...); sports venue (stadium, swimming pool); street (avenue, boulevard, road...); temporary installation; and transport infrastructure (airport, bridge, bus stop, station...). Normalization of the labour information was necessary in order to deal with coherent sets of data – a specifically difficult harmonization in the case of a corpus stretched over a long historical period and extended cross-borders. The RMWLE was therefore sorted according to the European framework of European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO). This classification identifies and categorises the professional components relevant for the EU labour market. Although this framework seems oriented towards data from the twenty-first century, the ESCO is in fact convenient to use for historicised data since it is based on skills and competences. Framework based on qualificationand occupation are difficult to adapt to historicised data, especially with a gender under scrutiny that often was not granted clear occupational titles to go with the labour they provided or was barred from attaining specific qualifications. The ESCO helps us describe the women in our data in terms of responsibility and autonomy. This can help us understand the position of these women in society and their influence, impact and leverage (which is the structural incrementation that is used to go from 0 to 9 in the framework) thanks to a competence-based approach, which ultimately supports a coherent study of work and cross-border mobility, because with the ESCO classification, “competence means the proven ability to use knowledge, skills and personal, social and/or methodological abilities, in work or study situations and in professional and personal development” (European Commission, 2018). How did we collect and harvest this landmark data? We mined a corpus of academic bibliographies on urban surveys, infrastructure indexes, and lists of toponymic and gender issues; we sifted through public information notices such as municipal and town hall minutes, local newspapers articles covering monument or toponym news. We used national registers and inventories of cadastral databases (with country specific geoportals such as the Romanian ANCPI geoportal, the Walloon Inventaire Centralisé des Adresses et des Rues (ICAR) or the French IGN Géoportail) or street names advocacy projects (such as the Romanian project at strazicurenume.ro). We then effected a selection by identifying significant migration episodes in the women-based landmarks of the corpus. These results were then cross-referenced for the appearance of these women’s names in geo-localisation web services (such as OpenStreet Map™, Google Maps™ or MapQuest™) which included a wider range of landmarks. Once identified, these landmarks were entered by a first contributor to a Google form and were then checked for conformity of data by a separate contributor before it was included on the landmarks register spreadsheet. This demanded extensive interdisciplinary cooperation within the COST network and allowed for outcome-oriented student workshops. The Excel spreadsheet dataset was completed on July 2023 and is available on NAKALA (Bakas et al., 2023). The Data Note is available to give a brief description of the dataset, including details of why and how it was created, and to promote the reuse of the data for research purposes (Ojala-Fulwood et al., 2024). Finally, an interactive map on landmarks, which is intended as both a visualization of our research and an educational interactive tool, is available on the Map of Women Migrants’ Landmarks on the website.3 Results 1) Memorializing migrant women in Europe remains skewed towards the elite Commemoration is generally the business of the elite, regardless of gender or settlement status - and no studies to this day has analysed the distribution of non-migrant man or woman landmarks in terms of social prestige linked to occupation, skills and competences. We cannot compare the specificities of our intersectional dataset of migrant women landmarks to other groups until this work has been done, but we can already draw conclusions about how our group of migrant women are most frequently memorialized: this remains skewed towards the elite. Naming landmarks is an act that depends on the jurisdiction and level of governance. Municipal or local governments are generally the main decision-makers for naming streets, parks, buildings, and local monuments, while provincial, national or federal governments are generally responsible for naming national landmarks or monuments such as war memorials or national parks. These bodies are not devoid of systemic patriarchy and mainstream, and the ability to control the meaning of place is an aspect of power and memory politics. The European Data Journalism Network project “Mapping Diversity” has evidenced that on average 91% of the streets named after individuals are dedicated to men (https://mappingdiversity.eu/). Monuments for women, especially migrant women are also conspicuous by their absence. Citizens have gained a heightened sense of the diversity imbalance in public landmarks in the recent decades, but progress remains slow, often falls short of addressing the gender imbalance, continue to obscure women or uphold gender stereotypes, as recent surveys of anticolonial and abolitionist statues in French Caribbean islands have shown (McGinnis, 2022; Sèbe, 2020). European debates surrounding national identities remain articulated in the public life of cities, great and small, around gendered statues that reveal a masculine national imagined community, especially in Eastern European urban areas (Johnson, 1995; Reeder, 2018) As the sculptor Anna Franziska 3 The Map of Women Migrants’ Landmarks in Europe is accessible at https:// www.womenonthemove.eu/map-women-migrants-landmarks#leaflet-map-viewpins-map-landmarks-and-exhibitions-block-map-landmarks Page 7 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 Schwarzbach reflected upon the unveiling of her statue of Lise Meitner in Berlin, this awareness justifies the statue’s oversized pedestal: “Outstanding women are rarely put on a pedestal. How difficult it must have been for a woman to work in science, how even more difficult to be respected. That gave me the idea to make the pedestal as wide as possible, as a way to commemorate the many ‘non-pedestalled” (Schwarzbach, 2014). Calls for more space devoted to usually non-pedestalled migrant women figures have risen, as perception of the socially constructed nature of the urban space around us has spread (Entrikin, 1991). Indeed, if naming places has often reinforced “claims of national ownership, state power, and masculine control,” more recently “attempts to rename (and in doing so, reclaim) places are implicated in the discursive politics of people and place.” (Berg & Kearns, 1996). The addition in 2002 of a migrant female figure, Marie Dentière (c. 1495–1561), to the ten male statues of the Reformation Wall in Geneva did little however to appease criticism. Although she played an active role in Genevan religion and politics, sustained by prominent public preaching, Dentière’s role was minimized by the male-centred archival curation of Geneva’s religious past. It is increasingly argued that cultural landscapes gain in transcultural dynamics and strengthen the perspective of alterity if they include not only the perspective of gender but also that of migratory trajectories (Čapská, 2025). Yet, the RMWLE shows that historical significance and visibility is rarely granted to those that are or have been minoritized. The fact that Marie Dentière’s plaque, rather than a statue, is neither central nor self-standing, placed as it is at the foot of a male statue, has not calmed the long tradition of vandal opposition to the monument’s controversial memorial endeavour (Scholl, 2020). The begrudging inclusion proves insufficient to rebalance the monument’s legacy of public memory. Such minimal acknowledgement, with a reduced position of female stories of migration is an unsatisfactory compromise that the RMWLE has uncovered multiple times. The RMWLE project has sharpened our understanding of the myriad of obstacles encountered by historic and cultural urban projects advocating for more inclusive commemorative practices. Place names can indeed be read as “part of the official memory of a city or a nation, [and as such they act] as evidence of social norms and values at a given time,” and are a “highly political process and a way of symbolically recognizing individuals or groups of people. This also means that city maps can be perceived as a documentation of social and political power relations” (Hintermann & Pilcher, 2015, 291–2). Therefore, initiatives such as the projects Toponomastica Femminile or Merezco Una Calle, have put the spotlight on the absence of women in urban spaces, and promoted a more egalitarian presence of women in the cities. The RMWLE testifies that a more diverse urban landscape is needed. Nowadays, urban projects largely intend to “strengthen urban storytelling and enhance citizens’ interest in history” (Hayden, 1996, 228). Officials are faced with a glut of prejudicial public art foregrounding values which are now inconsistent with the avowed public values of the very city, region or nation taking care of their upkeep (Doss, 2018). Urban planners also recognize the benefits of righting the balance by naming and commemorating recovered and unsung figures. This has been highlighted recently in the Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. The official mission of its eleventh goal seeks to make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, hence encompassing the issue of public art’s historically troubled relationship between conservation on the one hand and the fostering of diverse and socially representative public art on the other. Previous reports on the relationship between historic urban areas and cultural diversity and social inclusion have drawn bleak conclusions and underline the invisibility of women in the historic urban landscape. When intersected with migration, the results are even starker. Results of a 2018 World Heritage Convention and UNESCO consultation survey indicate that integration policies for migrants in historic urban areas averaged between 15% to 16% in European states (UNESCO, 2019, 12–13). The place of migrants, migrant stories and migration biographies is even more underserved by cultural projects rejuvenating historic urban landscapes. When being a woman and having an episode of migration is compounded with an underprivileged social background, presence in the RMWLE is even rarer. Low paid occupations rely on sets of skills that are defined by the labour market as low because they are negatively correlated to one’s amount of influence in society and to the extent of decision taking one is granted. In the RMWLE, representations of migrant women from the ESCO Classifications of labour going from Clerical (ESCO classification 4) to Elementary occupations (ESCO occupation 9) are conspicuous by their absence, although governesses, seamstresses, secretaries, factory workers and agricultural workers have long been the main professions of the bulk of migrant women. (See Figure 1). Rarely are landmarks made in the cultural landscape for those migrant women at the bottom of the social ladder, and when they are, they are often represented as collective entities, in the absence of named records or recorded biography. The RMWLE holds only one entry for Clerical support (ESCO classification 4), for example. This anonymous fate befalls the “potato girl” represented in the sculpture “Kartoffelpigen” in Fredericks Danemark, which depicts an anonymous girl, with potatoes on her lap and her back shaped like a potato. It was erected in 1984 by Ole Mynster Herold to commemorate the efforts of the potato farming workers, their interaction with the native population and the root crop they introduced to Denmark. Gottfred Eickhoff’s bronze sculpture Roepiger, erected in 1940 likewise shows unnamed “Beet Girls,” which form a monument to the agricultural workers from Poland and elsewhere who worked in the beet fields in Denmark from 1892 to 1929, most of whom were women. Memorialization of these migrant workers places women in public spaces and helps transgress the traditional approach that inscribes women in the private and domestic spheres (García & Rice, 2023). Regrettably, such efforts of memorialization provide but a Page 8 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 partial recovery of their stories: these women are memorialized but remain nameless. Admittedly, the ESCO categories are based on this hierarchy of domination in the work chain, and therefore inevitably reflect the status quo of power relations, in which higher categories “exercises power over [lower categories] by influencing, shaping or determining [their] very wants” (Lukes, 2005, 27). But the landmarks in the RMWLE continue to tell a more nuanced story too. 92 of the armed forces, managerial or professional figures that were memorialized rose to prominence thanks to their championing human rights, workers’ rights or women’s rights, which challenges the “power over” hierarchy mentioned above. It is the case of Deaconness but also the human rights activist Pauline Chaponnière-Chaix (1850 – 1934). By their career and activism, these women had at heart to give power to the above untold lives – their struggle to reverse power structures was a strong justification for their own memorialization. Even though some landmarks in the RMWLE are both nameless and without profession, they are still included because they have stories to tell and are far from allegorical representations. The 1981 Gli Emigranti bronze statue by Domenico Ghidoni in Brescia represents an unnamed woman and daughter waiting for departure, sitting on a bench with their luggage as personification and collective representation of migration. Although such statues often recycle the form and composition of “Charity” allegories, they do not choose the female form as aesthetically pleasing to represent a concept but to embody a lived experience and recognize that such women have left too little traces in history to be named. These monuments are therefore an effort of representation and visibility in favour of women migrants – a reconstruction and recovering act of care in the face of historical erasure of such records. Ghidoni’s Gli Emigranti uses realism in its portraiture, not idealization – more than a hundred years later, it continues to resonate with migration’s lived experience, and it has been moved from the secluded recess of the museum to the open space of the parco Torri Gemelle in Brescia in 2023. Collective memorialization of female migrants can also be linked to war crimes and atrocities. In Helsinki, Finland, the statue of a war evacuee-mother erected in 2015 commemorates Carelian war evacuee-mothers who were displaced during the Second World War. The sculpture of a refugee woman with child at the Waldfriedhof Troisdorf cemetery in Germany memorializes WWII expellees. Such monuments Figure 1. Migrant women’s occupation in the Register of Migrant Women Landmarks. Credit line: Authors. This bar graph compares the occupation of women memorialized by landmarks in Europe, based on 1000 entries of the Register of Migrant Women Landmarks using the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) taxonomy. The dataset can be found on NAKALA at https://doi. org/10.34847/nkl.28cf9j6q (Bakas et al., 2023). Most memorialized women had a professional or managerial career (ESCO 1 to ESCO 3), while women from clerical to elementary occupations (ESCO 4 to ESCO 9) are vastly underrepresented compared to the percentage of women pertaining to these classifications, historically and now, in contrast to elite careers. Page 9 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 As we have seen in our second part, there are signs of a growing public desire to acknowledge and honour the historical contribution of migrant women to the history of the countries, places, and communities they belonged to and enriched. The RMWLE offers both historical and more recent instances of their inclusion in the cultural landscape. We hope the RMWLE helps underline the systemic social exclusion in place naming that sees only a selection of career achievements be memorialized, missing out on the inclusive and transcultural richness and dynamism of the stories we uncovered. As explained in part three, the memorialization practices at play in most of Europe still gender-codes and marginalizes the achievements of migrant women. We hope the RMWLE helps support calls for more diverse, inventive, and frequent commemoration of migrant women, in the hope that their names and stories will take up more public space and weigh heavier in communal memory. The dominant narrative in public memorialization continues to be one of marginality, and the selection of these heroines often frames their achievements, despite the odds stacked against them, as exceptional – a reception in the urban landscape that does little to mainstream the recognition of female contribution in general. We learnt that we do more than “live” in places, we are shaped by them and are tasked by the names around us to tell better, more precise, less conventional stories to commemorate these names of migrant women. We wanted to draw attention to the material, ecological and gender-sensitive aspects of commemoration and thus to highlight that they can be shaped in conscious and critical ways. We see our project and dataset as part of a wider effort to encourage the cultivation of more inclusive public memorial landscapes where migrant women are duly represented, and migration experiences recognized. Ethics and consent - Ethical approval and consent were not required. Data availability statement NAKALA : Memorializing women on the move: A register of migrant women landmarks in Europe, DOI : 10.34847/ nkl.28cf9j6q. (Bakas et al., 2023) This project contains the following underlying data: • DataNote_Final_Dataset_Register of Migrant Women Landmarks in Europe_COSTACTION19112_WeMOV_ 1000entries 3.xslsx Data are available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0). References Andrews M: Shaping history. Narratives of political change. Cambridge University Press, 2007. Publisher Full Text Azaryahu M: The power of commemorative street names. Environ Plan D. 1996; 14(3): 311–330. Publisher Full Text Bakas FE: Community resilience through entrepreneurship: the role of gender. Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy. 2017; 11(1): 61–77. Publisher Full Text  BakasFE,ČapskáV,FrigrenP,et al.: Memorializing women on the move: a register of migrant women landmarks in Europe. 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This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Mihai S. Rusu 1 Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania 2 Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania The authors have done a good job in addressing properly all issues pointed out in the review report. As a result, the revised version of the paper is a significantly improved variant of the originally submitted material. Consequently, I endorse an acceptance of this paper in its current form. Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise: Gender studies, critical place-name research, sociology of culture, politics of memory. I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. Reviewer Report12 March 2025 https://doi.org/10.21956/openreseurope.21337.r51864 © 2025 Sung M. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Minki Sung 1 School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University School of Architecture Planning and Landscape (Ringgold ID: 151479), Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK 2 School of Architecture Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University School of Architecture Open Research Europe  Page 18 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 Planning and Landscape (Ringgold ID: 151479), Newcastle upon Tyne, England, UK This article has significantly improved based on the previous reviewers' feedback. I personally found the revisions in the second manuscript satisfactory. However, I have several suggestions for further enhancing the quality of the work. First, by the abstract itself, this article proposes a storytelling approach to challenge dominant cultural narratives and knowledge practices (“This article calls for a storytelling approach, to counter dominant cultural narratives and knowledge practices”). However, introducing this as a research method at the end of the abstract may confuse readers, leaving them uncertain about the overall methodological framework. It is unclear from the abstract whether the study employs a quantitative or qualitative approach (e.g., storytelling). Clarifying this point would help potential readers understand the research methods used to generate the findings. After reviewing the full manuscript, explicitly explaining the mixed-method approach—combining quantitative methods with a storytelling approach at the interpretation stage—would improve clarity and strengthen the methodological foundation. Second, power can also be seen as 'power to'. This statement seems to overlook the bottom-up power dynamics that enable low-paid workers to unite and amplify their voices. This 'power to' mechanism challenges the traditional 'power over' model, which assumes that only high-paid, high-status or elite individuals have influence in society, as evidenced by one of your sentences (“Low paid occupations rely on sets of skills that are defined by the labour market as low because they are negatively correlated to one’s amount of influence in society and to the extent of decision taking one is granted.”) Finally, there are a few typos or areas to improve clarity. What are numerous previous studies? Can you give an example to support your argument? (“Numerous previous studies about women represented in public art have harvested such allegorical representation as denoting female presence in the city landscape nonetheless, but our selection criteria that cross reference womanhood and the experience of migration in the biography of the woman represented made this category of monument irrelevant to the register”) Due to? (“The effort of collecting this data is still ongoing, but some areas are better represented as the RMWLE stands due the nature of data collection”). What is power and decision leverage in your research? (“Naming landmarks is an act that necessitates power and decision leverage, and therefore even more susceptible to be a space of systemic patriarchy and mainstream”). To whom does the act of outrage refer? Is the term to be interpreted as referring to the general public? (“The fact that Marie Dentière’s plaque, rather than a statue, is neither central nor selfstanding, placed as it is at the foot of a male statue, continues therefore to cause outrage”). Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise: My research explores how history is mobilised through social concepts like Open Research Europe  Page 19 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 heritage, historic urban landscapes, and cultural landscapes. As a heritage and landscape researcher, my interests include heritage values, heritage impacts, conservation planning, and the dynamics of historic and cultural landscapes. I am particularly interested in how the perception and use of history are shaped by society, especially through the lens of heritage and landscape, and how these are influenced by international, national, regional, and local policies. I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. Author Response 17 Oct 2025 Bénédicte Miyamoto We thank you for this careful review of our article, and the thoughtful suggestions that we hope have now enriched it. This new version corrects the abstract section to make the methodological choices clearer, stating we are combining quantitative methods with a storytelling approach at the interpretation stage. In the method and data collection section, we differentiate between surveys that include or exclude allegorical landmarks and have added clear references to both the surveys that exclude or include. This has helped us make clearer the fact that surveys that include allegories are not surveys of women landmarks, but landmarks of femininity, and we thank you for this added clarity. In the Results section, we also give a brief sketch of which jurisdiction or level of governance the decisions to name landmarks generally depend on - and this has also helped makeclear (although cases are different European wide) that this generally is divided according to the category of landmarks. This is probably quite useful for those readers that would be specifically interested in our work on landmarks categories. We also nuancedour finding that memorializing migrant women in Europe remains skewed towards the elite - we made it clearer that ESCO categories quantitatively show a higher level of landmarks memorializing elite women, but that ESCO categories are themselves a product of a "power over" analysis. Although we cannot extract from our data of mostly anonymous lower category landmarks much storytelling to support the "power to" narrative, we show now that asizeable number of the elite landmarkswere activists, fighting to give power to minoritized or the downtrodden, and we hope this nuancesthe hierarchy of the elite's "power over" the other ESCO categories. We have also corrected typos and updated the reference section. Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Version 1 Reviewer Report03 January 2025 https://doi.org/10.21956/openreseurope.19920.r45927 Open Research Europe  Page 20 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 © 2025 Kocsis A. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Andrea Kocsis 1 Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 2 Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK 3 Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK While the project's goal of investigating the connection between gender and migration in memorialscapes deserves praise, the paper would benefit from a few methodological and theoretical suggestions. More methodological information would be necessary to support the results, especially if the authors emphasise the role of deep data. The structure, extent, and parameters of the dataset are unclear, and more information on the data collection and management process is required. Particularly, as the analysis points out the presence of bias in the results, knowing the circumstances and limitations of the dataset would be essential. It is hinted that the dataset consists of 1000 entries, and the variables are broadly listed later in the document, however, a more in-depth, explicit, and early explanation of the nature and background of the dataset would be crucial, even if it is linked to the study. For example, the temporal or geographical dimensions of the collected entries are never introduced. It is also unclear what the role of the authors was in the dataset design and data collection. There are also terminological issues, for example, the authors use "database" and "dataset" interchangeably, which suggests confusion about structuring and handling data. For this reason, perhaps omitting the focus on the unstable quantitative angle and highlighting the Register as a valuable but qualitative resource would be a better approach. Similarly to the above point, the analysis is not explained. The parameters of the "Qualitative Content Analysis" are not available. Seeing at least the high-level coding categories/themes for CA would be beneficial. However, in its present form, instead of CA, particular case studies were chosen to be investigated after counting the occurrences of some variables in the dataset (e.g., occupation). This approach is also valid, but the project should be explicit about the exact methods. Additionally, the title of the article promises mapping, but more spatial discussions and some GIS analysis would be needed to support the argument. For example, the observation about the landmarks' often peripheral locations is fascinating but should be supported by analysis. Regarding theory, the article should consider three points. The first is the temporal dimensions of the collected landmarks. Urban memory is transient, and - depending on their geographical location and national/governmental backgrounds - memorials are constantly moved, removed, modified, and reinstalled. How this is accounted for in the analysis or recorded in the dataset is unclear. Secondly, in connection with the above, introducing and evaluating the landmarks' geographical distribution would be crucial. For example, not the same memory political approach applies to the memorialscape of Central Europe and the UK. Hence, handling them together might distort the results. Knowing the geographical distribution would be essential as the changing Authorised Heritage Discourse (cf. Smith 2006) from state to state, municipality to municipality, and regime to regime defines the commemorative landscape. Finally, the historical context of Open Research Europe  Page 21 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 migration should matter. For example, the memory political reception of migration in the case of a 16th-century foreign princess and a Jewish nurse escaping the Nazi regime is different. However, as the temporality of the dataset is not explained, the paper does not distinguish historical contexts. Considering the findings, the study would benefit from reflecting on the possibility that commemoration is generally the business of the elit, regardless of gender or settlement status. Furthermore, the study points out an interesting hypothesis about the Register demonstrating that "exceptional accomplishments of the kind that earns a woman public commemoration would frequently include a migration episode." However, the abovementioned lack of detailed methodology makes it unclear what supports this conclusion. The intersectional focus is the strength of the project, but the dataset on its own might not be enough to draw this inference without tautology. To further prove the relationship between migration and gender in memorialscapes, it would be essential to cross-reference the results with data on landmarks dedicated to non-migrant women and/or migrant men. The argument is strongest and most supported regarding the evaluation of the values and stereotypes for which women are commemorated. However, as mentioned above, it is unclear how specific it is to migrant women. Overall, to achieve the important and timely aim of the project, namely highlighting the connection between historical migration and gender in the urban landscape, the study would benefit from either clarifying the methodological, quantitative, and data angles of the paper or explicitly adopting the narrative storytelling approach. As Benjamin M. Schmidt recently pointed out, narrative storytelling is a welcome and perfectly valid angle of digital history, and emphasising the strength of historical narration might be a better way than imperfectly quantifying the sources (cf. Schmidt 2024)-Schmidt, B. M. (2024). Two Volumes. The Lessons of Time on the Cross. In: Tilton, L., Mimno, D., & Johnson, J. M. (eds). Computational humanities. University of Minnesota Press.161-176. ISBN: 9781517915988, ISBN-13 : 978-1517915971 . References 1. Smith L: Uses of Heritage. 2006. Publisher Full Text Is the work original in terms of material and argument? Yes Does it sufficiently engage with relevant methodologies and secondary literature on the topic? Partly Is the work clearly and cogently presented? Partly Is the argument persuasive and supported by evidence? Partly Open Research Europe  Page 22 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 If any, are all the source data and materials underlying the results available? Yes Does the research article contribute to the cultural, historical, social understanding of the field? Partly Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise: My research interest is in the intersection of Heritage Studies and Data Science, with a special focus on urban landscapes. I'm an interdisciplinary scholar with a background in Memory Studies, Heritage Studies, Urban History, Computational Humanities, Digital History, and Data Science. I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. Author Response 17 Feb 2025 Bénédicte Miyamoto As the project is winding down and coming to a close (March 2025) we are grateful for the through methodology advice that you have offered. Your just remarks cannot be all addressed due to the constraints of the project and the realities of collaborative work, but we have implemented the following. We thank you for reminding us that simply linking the Data Note and Dataset is insufficient to support the article, and that the structure, extent, and parameters of the dataset must be made explicit in the body of the article. With help from yours and other reviewers’ reports, we have made changes to:  The methodology section:1. We have specified the temporal and geographical dimensions of the collected entries as follows and addressed the question of erased or displaced landmarks in our register.  [ “Our network linked 52 scholars and students, listed as having contributed to the collection of data for the RMWLE in the Data Note ( Ojala-Fulwood et al., 2024). These researchers coming from 41 different countries built a dataset covering 41 countries (Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United-Kingdom). We eschewed historical boundaries in our collection, which currently spans from the 9th century to the present, to build a picture of what, as of now, is present in the European architectural memorial landscape (rather than a picture of landmarks erected or named since a specific date; or landmarks referring to women active during a specific period). The main goal of the article was to be able to give current quantitative data to highlight the dearth of figures in the memorial landscape that Open Research Europe  Page 23 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 intersect both migration history and the identity of women. We did not allow for landmarks that have disappeared or been replaced, and if such landmarks from older databases or historical documents appeared at the collection stage, the need for currently valid geocoordinates to be registered in our dataset enabled us to weed out erased or displaced landmarks.”]  Part 1: Memorializing migrant women in Europe remains skewed towards the elite 1.  We thank you for the reminder that that commemoration is generally the business of the elite, regardless of gender or settlement status, which we have now underlined in this Part 1 intro, and we have stressed that no studies to this day has analyzed the distribution of nonmigrant male or female landmarks in terms of social prestige linked to occupation, skills and competences. This has therefore qualified the conclusions we can as yet infer from the register, given the lack of comparative studies.  We thank you also for the validation of the labour categories we built into the register’s design, on which we based our evaluation of the values and stereotypes for which women are commemorated, which you underlined was the strongest point of the article. We strove to reinforce this merit of the article by delving more deeply into the exact photo fit of the memorialized professional women (Esco Category 2, the largest category memorialized) by visualizing a more in-depth break down of the skills and competences that were deemed worthy of memorialization. We recoded the Esco category column of these category 2 women to add a more granular level of occupation skills and competences, which can be found in the newly submitted Figure 2 – Professional Migrant Women in the Register of Migrant Women Landmarks, which uses threedigit ESCO categories instead of 1-digit. We added a discussion of this new figure to the text.   Part 2: Memorializing migrant women in Europe remains a marginal commemoration, tributary of gendered spatial patterns 1.  WE thank you for underlining that the study points out an interesting hypothesis about the Register demonstrating that "exceptional accomplishments of the kind that earns a woman public commemoration would frequently include a migration episode." We agree however, that lack of comparable studies about non-migrant women or non-migrant men make these a hypothesis as of yet unproven. We have amended the text as follows: “We encountered a pattern of memorialization that hinted at a denser network of visibility in the political landscape of the city. In the light of the above recent sociological research, we suspect that our intersectional RMWLE could be used to posit that exceptional life accomplishments of the kind that earns a woman public commemoration would frequently include a migration episode. Such a conclusion cannot be drawn yet, due to the absence of survey studies on non-migrant women (or male) landmarks, however. There is furthermore yet too few empirical research and biographical studies that frame migration as an empowering episode and as a defining life-project rather than a biographical incident or accident ( Boldt, 2012). (…) Our team’s effort has been to read against the grain these notable women's biographies and recover these episodes of migration. We hope further comparative studies and efforts of case studies will continue to investigate these migration episodes as decisive assets in these women's social recognition.”   Addendum on Case studies1.  We have stressed that the quantitative register is unstable, as you have rightly pointed out, Open Research Europe  Page 24 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 and remind the reader that “the available empirical material of migrant women landmarks “in situ” is subject to change as the memorial landscape evolves, and our research has been deliberately conceived as open-ended and open access”. To this end, we have both corrected our mentions of Case Studies in the Methodology sections and our references to case studies in the body of the text (our examples bring alive the register to the reader but we point out that they are not studies in the methodological sense). We devised an addendum at the end of the article calling for the development of local, municipal and nation level Case Studies analysis using the register. In this addendum, we stressed that case studies concentrating on geographical or temporal distributions would be essential to reflect the changing “authorized heritage discourse” from state to state, municipality to municipality, and regime to regime, and how this defines the commemorative landscape (we reference the work of Smith 2006). In this regard, we have also introduced specific research to support points in the body of the text to highlight what local case studies (for example the research of Rusu on gendered street naming in post-communist Romania, 2024; or the research of Sèbe on racial patterns in post-colonial French DOM-TOM, 2020) or municipal case studies (we have added reference to the research of Novas Ferradás on Santiago de Compostela City’s Urban Toponymy, 2018) can bring as for nuance and historically specific patterns. We also stressed that quantitative methods are appropriate for our subject (we reference the work of Krippendorff 2019) but benefit from being doubled by storytelling at the interpretation stage, as referenced in the methodology section (where we referenced Parry, 2020). We are grateful for the methodological backing you offered about Case Studies and storytelling approaches and have built on them into the addendum (notably relying on Hamilton, Howard, and Pick, 2008’s call to action). Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Report18 December 2024 https://doi.org/10.21956/openreseurope.19920.r48015 © 2024 Rusu M. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Mihai S. Rusu 1 Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania 2 Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania 3 Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Sibiu, Romania The article provides a timely analysis of a scarcely research topic, that is, the memorial artefacts dedicated to migrant women across Europe. This is a timely piece due to a couple of reasons: first, research on women’s invisibility in the symbolics of public place is gaining traction, and so are the claims to address it coming from feminist movements and other civic organizations; secondly, the Open Research Europe  Page 25 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 Geography, and Nationalism; McGinnis, L. Memorializing Masculinity? Gendering the Iconography of French Colonialism and Anticolonial Resistance in Martinique and Guadeloupe, 2022; Sèbe, B: Colonial heroes, 2020). We have also made clear one of the blind spot of the article, since no studies to this day has analyzed the distribution of nonmigrant man or women landmarks in terms of social prestige linked to occupation, skills and competences. We reminded the reader that we cannot compare the specificities of our intersectional dataset of migrant women landmarks to other groups until this work has been done.  3)Addendum  We devised an addendum at the end of the article calling for the development of local, municipal and nation level Case Studies analysis using the register. As you rightly pointed out, municipalities have considerable power in determining which aspects of history are mobilised and celebrated within the built environment. In this addendum, we also stressed that case studies concentrating on geographical or temporal distributions would be essential to reflect the changing “authorized heritage discourse” from state to state, municipality to municipality, and regime to regime, and how this defines the commemorative landscape (Smith 2006). We also stressed that quantitative methods are appropriate for our subject (Krippendorff 2019) but benefit from being doubled by storytelling at the interpretation stage, and at a more local level, as referenced in the methodology section (Parry, 2020) and the addendum (Hamilton, Howard, and Pick, 2008, i). Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Report06 November 2024 https://doi.org/10.21956/openreseurope.19920.r45598 © 2024 Holmberg E. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Eva Johanna Holmberg 1 University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 2 University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 3 University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland This research article does important cultural work in unveiling the many ways migrant and mobile women's memorialisation has been skewed and marginalised in collective urban acts of commemoration (by naming streets and urban areas, sculptures, and other material means). It also produces knowledge about what types of mobile and migratory women's life stories have been recorded (which has been skewed towards educated urban elites and women of higher social classes and political positions). When developing the project in the future, the authors might want to put more emphasis on how a wider set of women's stories might be preserved, also Open Research Europe  Page 32 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025 outside the classic urban commemorative practices, paying attention to an even wider set of intersectional inequalities, the fluidity and mixing of gender and race, and the changing practices and actions of mobility and migration within an individual life course - whether trans-women might be included in the categories of womanhood more explicitly, and whether mixed-race backgrounds and a great variety of refugee and forced migration would be included in these identity categories that are commemorated in the future, and what is the role of 'non-European' or 2nd generation migrant women amongst 'women on the move'? Do migrant women always have to become 'heroines' or is that one form of assigning them with additional requirements to fit in? These are just some examples of the type of questions I would pose in an informal dialogue with the project participants but might be worth pondering more in the future if and when the project expands. Is the work original in terms of material and argument? Yes Does it sufficiently engage with relevant methodologies and secondary literature on the topic? Yes Is the work clearly and cogently presented? Yes Is the argument persuasive and supported by evidence? Yes If any, are all the source data and materials underlying the results available? Yes Does the research article contribute to the cultural, historical, social understanding of the field? Yes Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise: Cultural history, history of mobility, cultural encounter, travel writing studies, life writing studies I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. Open Research Europe  Page 33 of 33 Open Research Europe 2025, 4:234 Last updated: 11 NOV 2025